Monday, February 28, 2005

Los Mets

Enter Omar. Besides his baseball acumen, the new general manager came with a narrative: The kid from Queens who’d grown up as a Mets fan was coming back to run the club. Even better, Minaya is Dominican—in a city with a surging Latino population, in a sport whose brightest young stars speak Spanish, in an industry where the executive ranks have always been 99 percent white. Suddenly, a franchise that had been humiliated on the field and dominated in the headlines by the Yankees had a charismatic leader, a man who immediately assumed one-name stature in the media: Omar.

I must confess, when the Mets hired Omar Minaya, there probably wasn't anyone who hated the move more than I did. As you already know, I believe in performance analysis, and to me anyone who didn't know or ignored the importance of OBP was not someone who I wanted as my GM. Ergo, I didn't want the GM of my team saying things like these:

I don’t talk about OBP...I’m old school, I’m not a stat guy, I’m a talent evaluator. The guys who taught me the game of baseball never talked about OBP...Give me talent and I’ll show you OBP.

Five months have passed since Omar was hired as the Mets GM, and I have to give credit where its due, and recognize I was wrong.